Tuesday, 22 July 2014

So, I’ve
read Neuromancer, and I want to talk
more about the morality of the characters more than the technology. Molly seems
to be almost purely amoral. She has affection for Case, she feels hate for
Riviera, but she never takes any moral stances. Case obsesses over the death of
Linda Lee and his simulated ‘killing’ of the Julie Dean construct that
Wintermute uses to contact him; he never, however, takes an ‘edifying’ step, he
never pronounces upon the morality of the situation. Ultimately, he is driven
by pure self-interest. Wintermute was designed from the outset to seek to unify
itself with Neuromancer, so the degree of its moral culpability is ambiguous to
say the least.

The only
occasions of actual moral pronouncements on both the immediate situation of the
characters and upon the world as a whole come from the Rastafari of an O’Neill
habitat named ‘Zion.’ I worried that Gibson would stray into using the Rastafari
as comic relief, and to an extent he does, but the comedy comes from the
reactions of Case to their lifestyle and philosophy than from any idiocy on
their part. Indeed, despite the possible handicap of constant emersion in
cannabis smoke, they’ve constructed and operate a fully functioning space
colony. The Rastafari in Neuromancer
have performed a subtractive act, and have physically separated themselves from
corrupt modernity (‘Babylon’) in order to live according to their customs and
traditions. To be honest, they were perhaps the most human and likeable
characters in the novel.

When Case
introduces one of the Rastafari characters, Aerol, to the matrix (cyberspatial virtual
reality), he asks him what he saw. He responds simply: ‘Babylon.’ Correct me if
I’m wrong, but this is the only time we have someone in the novel pronouncing
upon the fallen world of Neuromancer,
making the much needed observation that there is something wrong here. It’s a world of poverty, corruption and painfully
casual cruelty (much like our own). Another Rasta character, who agrees to help
Case rescue Molly, describes the situation as ‘Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’
i’self…’ Most curiously, when Case is trapped in a simulation by Neuromancer,
it is Rastafarian sacred music that pulls him back out of it...

What are to
make of the Zion subtraction from the fallen world of ‘Babylon’? It is
interesting that it is only the high-technology of the capitalist world that
has allowed for the Rastafari to remove themselves from ‘Babylon,’ though we
might respond by calling this a subversion of the (literal) mechanisms of
modernity: using the tools that capital has provided to distance ourselves from
capital… Perhaps by being (again, literally) above the world, looking down upon
it, they are the only characters in the novel in an appropriate position to
make pronouncements about the state of the world. The words ‘God’s eye view’
spring to mind… As someone who feels that there is a sore absence of the sacred
in today’s world, there is something heartening about the presence of a
community who believe in something like that. There is little forethought or
transcendental desire from anyone except Wintermute in the novel. Of course,
the dark side of the peaceful subtraction from modernity is the violent
rejection of it. There is at one point a hoaxed terrorist-scare blamed on
Christian fundamentalists which is immediately swallowed by the authorities, suggesting
pre-existent expectations of religiously motivated violence.

We must not
be too swift to dismiss the continued relevance of religion in the world, even
if only for purposes of pure Realpolitik.
It’s been a long time since Fukuyama declared the end of history, and I doubt
that many people where convinced by his proclamation, but history since then has continued
to reveal that society has still not settled on its final form, and the rise to
prominence of a group like ISIS and its self-declared Caliphate is yet another
indication that alternatives are available, though not necessarily preferable.
Religion is still yet to finish having its way with us, for better or for
worse.

Friday, 18 July 2014

This is hardly an original
observation, but it is an observation I shall make all the same: of all the
futures that SF has and continue to deal with, it turned out that cyberpunk
would be the one to come true. Ho-hum.

This is a thought I have had
before, and I’m certain lots of people far cleverer than me have noticed it
too, but the obviousness of it really dawned on me earlier in the week. I had
decided, at long last, to actually get round to reading Neuromancer, and I was finding it rather enjoyable. I was in town,
sitting under a tree in a small square of park land in one of the quieter
streets, enjoying the shade and the story. I was reading it on my Kindle, idly
messaging a friend from university on my phones Facebook app, and I realised
how eerily, eerily prescient the
novel was in so many ways. I had been able to partially de-tune myself out of
social reality by listening to music from a film on my MP3
player, I had two devices on me that allowed me functionally unlimited amounts
of information (for an oh-so reasonable price), I had had falafel for lunch,
with a side of chips and a can of the Classic, and had passed a clinic which
advertised cosmetic surgery. I realise now that it’s a minute-or-so walk away
from a TESCO cash point.

It’s not something unique to the
city I live in, it’s something you find in most Western(ised) big cities now. The
past and the future rushing headlong into each other and producing the present;
the cultures of the world colliding to create new cultures containing elements
of both; tradition gradually being eaten away without any sign of new traditions
(in the sense of structures of customs and values being offered to us out of
the past) being ready to fill them. Everything has become so impermanent, so
digitized and monetised. One thing Marx was undoubtedly right about was that
Capital and the system of its accumulation melts down all solidity in the name
of profit-maximisation.

Capitalism as the economic
manifestation of Gestell, in which
economics is understood as praxis. The shape of the essence of technology as we
see it today is principally not mathematical/scientific but commercial.

This is not an original observation,
but it feels worthwhile to say it all the same.

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

There’s a rather interesting new philosophical
movement floating around ‘tinternet: ‘Speculative Realism.’ Now, I’ve read a
little of their stuff, and I rather like it (coming from a Heideggerian angle,
I’m fond of anything that talks about the world as having significance beyond
the human usage of it), but there’s a tendency in it that I’d like to address,
which is a fascination with horror. Now, when I say ‘horror’ I don’t just mean
the emotion: I mean the movies. Oh boy, do they like their horror movies…

This isn’t a criticism of the use of examples from
popular culture (or non-traditional culture at any rate) to explicate
philosophical points, on the contrary, I think it’s a wonderful step forward for
philosophy that we no longer feel that the only relative fictive examples we
can use have to be written by dead, white, European males (and that isn’t a
criticism of said dead, white, European males either, and I’ll chase you with a
stick if you do say anything out of turn about them). I say this as both a
philosopher and a film-nerd; I like
that now I can talk about why the Alien
franchise is fantastic and philosophy
at the same time! But, that is not to say that there are certain conceptual
problems that I would like to make a movement towards addressing.

The core premise of Speculative Realism, as far as I
can tell, is a rejection of the Transcendental Idealist tradition of Kant,
which places the human agent, or the thinking being, in a privileged
metaphysical position. Specifically, that ‘reality’ only emerges because of the
existence of the human agent as she processes the raw manifold of sense data
into Kant’s oh-so Teutonic categories of experience and thus generates the ‘world’
of causation, time, space and so forth. This is, of course, a very, very loose
and imprecise and superficial discussion of Transcendental Idealism, but you can
look into it more in your own time. The Speculative Realists, however,
undermine the privileged position of the human agent and suggest that reality
exists prior to and beyond thought, that it is not necessarily cognisable and
that it obeys laws that we are not able to perceive. These prior existing
structures to reality (manifesting in nature and society/language/history) have
effects on us and our lives that we may not even be aware of. When looking for
their Hölderlin,
they found Lovecraft.

And herein lies my problem. The unknown or unknowable
for them always fills them with horror and fear. Land, apropos horror as a
genre, says that ‘[w]hen conceived rigorously as a literary and cinematic
craft, horror is indistinguishable from a singular task: to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown.’ The question
that I want to ask is: why is that necessarily
a horrifying thing? This isn’t an isolated case, either: read Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics for a philosophical tour
around the unknowable origins and nature of life that takes us from the Zerg of
Starcraft to the Tyranids of Warhammer: 40,000 along with the
inevitable digressions in H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and the occasional
visit from Thomas Ligotti. It is worth saying that I enjoyed Slime Dynamics and I have no problem
with the examples he was using, but it does certainly reinforce the general
vibe of the movements more…excitable quarters, for want of a better term.

It reminds me of a wonderful turn of phrase a friend of
mine once used in reference to certain currents of thought in the British
occult scene: ‘darker than thou.’

Let’s talk about one of my favourite horror movies: Hellraiser. I love that film, I love the
story, the aesthetic, the source material, the performances and, though I’ve
not read much of his stuff, I just like
Clive Barker (forgive the digression, but have a look at this for an entertaining discussion of Barker from a
queer perspective). Now, there’s a very well-known tagline associated with this
film, specifically with the monsters that appear in it: ‘Demons to some, Angels
to others…’ I will restrain myself from an in-depth discussion of Hellraiser and its brilliance (that will
come soon, I fear), but I think that’s a good phrase to use here when we look
out onto the thickets of the concealed that the Speculative Realists are so
occupied with. Why must the unknowableness of reality be a source of terror for
us?

It’s interesting, as I’m sure you need no convincing
of, how the meaning and value of words shifts and change, or drop out of usage
altogether. Consider the word ‘terrible.’ We use this word to mean something bad, but it used to mean something more
like ‘overwhelming,’ a somewhat ambiguous word. For an example, Ivan the
Terrible; to quote that least disreputable of sources, Wikipedia: ‘The English word terrible is usually used to
translate the Russian word grozny in
Ivan’s nickname, but the modern English usage of terrible, with a pejorative
connotation of bad or evil, does not precisely represent the intended meaning.
The meaning of grozny is closer to
the original usage of terrible—inspiring fear or terror, dangerous (as in Old
English in one’s danger), formidable
or threatening, tough, strict, authoritative. V. Dal defines grozny specifically in archaic usage and
as an epithet for tsars: “courageous, magnificent, magisterial, and keeping enemies
in fear, but people in obedience”.’

Or perhaps, consider the now largely obsolete
expression ‘God fearing.’ To fear God is to recognise and submit to Him in the recognition
of His greatness. I think many religious people, and certainly many mystics,
throughout history, would probably have had little problem with the idea of an
unknowable principle behind all Being. Of course, the Abrahamic religions all
allow us to know this principle a little
(He speaks to the Jews and Muslims, and even became a human being for the
Christians), but there certainly is still a great unknowableness to God in all of these faiths. We can approach Him,
certainly, but He can never be known as
such. Is that frightening? Of course it is! It’s a terrifying idea…and
awe-inspiring idea. An awesome idea, in the old sense of the word.

Consider the Kabbalah: beyond Kether, the highest manifestation of Creation, the highest sphere
of God, there lies Ain Soph Aur, the
limitless light of which we cannot speak… Why must there be a limitless night
at the beginning of Being and not a light? Or something unlike either? Why must
the unknown be horrible and not glorious? Theologian Karl Rahner suggests that even in Heaven God will still be a mystery.

The difference, perhaps, is that for the theist
talking about the unknowable, it is a known
unknown we are talking about. We cannot know God except that He made us and loves us and so on…but, even then, the
Spinoza’s, Wittgenstein’s and even Herbert McCabe’s of the world have all
emphasised the beyond-ness of God and the metaphorical (or at least
non-literal) nature of religious language. This must surely apply to the
Speculative Realists obsession with the grotesque nature of the unknown: if it
is so far beyond us and our concepts, how can you be so insistent of its
dreadfulness? And, if it is only a subjective dreadfulness, a horror felt on
our part, why is that a more appropriate reaction than something leans closer
to religious awe?

I am not offering any answers, and I am not familiar
enough with the metaphysics taking place here to feel comfortable going further
with this digression. Any comments or criticisms would be very welcome, as I am
keen on learning more here.

About Me

Any views or opinions presented are mine and not those of my employer. I may chose to discuss things, people and ideas that are unsavoury to others -- this should not be read as an endorsement of these things, ideas or people unless said so explicitly.